Currencies of Imagination: Channeling Money and Chasing Mobility in Vietnam

Throughout Currencies of Imagination, Small masterfully navigates between vividly rendered ethnographic stories and astute interpretations of anthropological and allied theory, challenging readers to rethink the gift and money anew. And that is a gift social scientists can use.

[An] important contribution and benefit to economic and anthropolohical investigations of mobility, money, identity and imaginaries.

This book will appeal to anthropologists and sociologists interested in remittance economies, international migration, as well as the diasporic community and social transformations of Vietnam. This reader in particular finds in it an intimate and intriguing portrayal of Vietnam, a nation that is always on a spectacular move but is haunted by its past and troubled by an ambiguous present.

Currencies of Imagination, by Ivan Small, is a path-breaking book that draws on over a decade of anthropological research to tell a powerful story about migration and cultural remittances sent to Vietnam. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the dynamic meanings of money in a transnational context.

Ivan V. Small's book Currencies of Imagination is a remarkably tight ethnographic account of how affectively complex money becomes when it flows between borders, boundaries, and kin. Small's book is a timely reminder of why it is important to pay attention to the inequalities and opportunities attached to migrant lives in the United States.

In Vietnam, international remittances from the Vietnamese diaspora are quantitatively significant and contribute important economic inputs. Yet beyond capital transfer, these diasporic remittance economies offer insight into an unfolding transformation of Vietnamese society through the extension of imaginations and ontological possibilities that accompany them. Currencies of Imagination examines the complex role of remittances as money and as gifts that flow across, and mediate between, transnational kinship networks dispersed by exile and migration.

Long distance international gift exchanges and channels in a neoliberal political economy juxtapose the increasing cross-border mobility of remittance financial flows against the relative confines of state bounded bodies. In this contradiction Ivan V. Small reveals a creative space for emergent imaginaries that disrupt local structures and scales of desire, labor and expectation. Furthermore, the particular characteristics of remittance channels and mediums in a global economy, including transnational mobility and exchangeable value, affect and reflect the relations, aspirations, and orientations of the exchange participants. Small traces a genealogy of how this phenomenon has shifted through changing remittance forms and transfer infrastructures, from material and black market to formal bank and money services. Transformations in the affective and institutional relations among givers, receivers, and remittance facilitators accompany each of these shifts, illustrating that the socio-cultural work of remittances extends far beyond the formal economic realm they are usually consigned to.

Ivan Small’s book is a very exciting contribution to a topic of major significance in Vietnam, that of remittances. Small shows that the way in which money is sent back to Vietnam from California transforms social interactions as well as the social significance of money.

Ivan V. Small is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston. He is co-editor of Money at the Margins.